Kirk Franklin is a gospel music phenomenon. With three Grammys, 20 number one hits and more than 10 million records sold—Kirk is credited with single-handedly taking gospel music to the mainstream. He's even been named by People magazine as one of the sexiest men alive.
He and his wife of nine years, Tammy, are the parents of four beautiful children. Four years ago, however, Kirk was hiding a dark obsession from his family and friends.
Kirk says he's been addicted to pornography since he was 8 years old. "Growing up, everybody's got a friend that's got that big brother that has the stash [of pornographic magazines or videotapes] under the bed," he says. "From my first look, I was hooked."
Kirk believes that the pornography affected him differently from most boys because it filled a void left by a broken home. "I was adopted when I was 4," he says. "The woman who adopted me, she was 64 years old. My mama didn't want me; my daddy wasn't there. So there were a lot of insecurities and low self-esteem. For me, [the porn] was like company."
When he was 15, Kirks says he began getting serious about his faith and went to his pastor to talk about his struggle with pornography. "He sat back in his chair, and he took a puff out of his cigar," Kirk remembers. "He said, 'Oh, you're young—you'll grow out of it.' He had no idea that he spoke death into my life. That shut me down because [I thought], 'Well, someday I'll grow out.' [Instead], I grew in—and I grew in deep."
Kirk says he thought marriage would "fix" his obsession with pornography. "[But] that's when I started realizing how much it was an addiction." He found himself sneaking to watch videos while Tammy was sleeping and craving porn more than ever. When marriage didn't erase his feelings of loneliness, he realized the severity of his compulsion. "Then I had to accept that I had a problem," he says.
Kirk once felt so much self-disgust over his porn collection that he drove far away from his house to throw it away. "I tried to go to sleep that night, and it was literally like a drug calling me," he remembers. "About 3 or 4 in the morning, in my flip-flops and boxers, I got in my car and drove back to that Dumpster and dug [looking for my porn]."
Kirk says that this rock-bottom moment helped him realize the serious nature of his addiction, and he soon came clean to his wife.
Tammy recalls the moment her husband opened up about his addiction. "He sat me down, and he said, 'Babe, I want to talk to you about a problem that I've been struggling with.' He had such sincerity in his eyes—you could tell that this pained him. For me, my immediate reaction was to just support him in it."
Looking back, Tammy says she saw signs that Kirk's addiction had been affecting their sex life. "It started not to be special," she remembers. "You're not expecting to feel dirty with your husband."
"I see pornography as such a sexual act that I saw it as cheating," Kirk says. "I [was] bringing images of other women into my bedroom with my wife."
Kirk says he has worked hard to overcome his addiction. People in his church community, he says, helped him find fulfillment in his music and faith. "They sat down and showed me, 'This is why you sing about what you sing about. It's not about your money; it's not about your car—it's about your heart. It's about your character.' Then I started seeing myself the way that God saw me."
After years of "feeling like a hypocrite," Kirk now considers himself free of his addiction. His relapses became fewer and farther between, and now, with the support of his wife, he says he's been "clean" for more than five years.
But, in millions of households across the country, people still struggle with a serious addiction to pornography.
Rebecca says her husband's addiction to Internet pornography is destroying their marriage. Josh, Rebecca's husband, has been struggling with his obsession for four of the five years they've been married.
"I am really struggling with whether to stay with him," Rebecca wrote to Oprah in an e-mail. "'It's just porn,' I tell myself. All men watch porn...but to what extent? How often is normal? What if it starts to replace our sex life? I know I am not the only woman whose marriage is being destroyed by Internet pornography."
Experts call the Internet the "crack cocaine" of sexual addiction. According to Family Safe Media, a company that sells parental control products for computers, pornography is, and has always been, the most profitable online industry, with more than 4 million pornographic websites in existence.*
Rebecca says she first discovered pornographic websites on the family's computer two weeks after the birth of their first child. She says the discovery made her feel self-conscious about the weight she gained during pregnancy and hurt her feelings. After she confronted Josh, she hoped it would never happen again. But, over the past four years, she says Josh's addiction has progressed rapidly.
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Some days, Josh says, he would spend eight straight hours looking at pornographic websites. Rebecca says their sex life has become nonexistent, and they've considered separating.
Josh says he realized he was an addict when he started thinking about moving out. "I was delaying separating because I needed to have enough money to get an apartment, but I had to have a computer when I moved into my apartment," Josh says.
After his realization, Josh admitted that he was an addict, and he's been taking steps to break the cycle. Josh says that, as of today, he hasn't looked at a porn website in two weeks.
Looking at porn isn't about arousal—it's a compulsion, Josh says.
Now that he's stopped looking at pornographic websites, Josh's body is suffering from withdrawal symptoms. For the past two weeks, Josh says he's been getting headaches and feeling irritable and anxious. "You wouldn't expect this because, you think, 'It's material that you choose to look at,'" he says. "But, I mean, drugs are things that you choose to take."
Rebecca thinks her husband's addiction was an attempt to fill a void in his life. "He found a sense of peace and a sense that everything was okay when he was by himself in front of that computer," she says. "He didn't have to deal with the outside world."
Rob Weiss, the founder of the Sexual Recovery Institute in Los Angeles, says Kirk, Tammy, Rebecca and Josh are not alone—porn addiction is becoming an epidemic in this country.
Rob says porn addicts become hooked on their brains' chemical responses to the stimulating material. "I think of sex addicts as being drug addicts—only their drug is their own neurochemistry, Rob says. "It's what turns them on. ... I talk to guys who say that hours and hours and hours go by, and they're not even aware of the time change because they're so filled with adrenalin and dopamine and serotonin."
Contrary to popular belief, sex addiction is not about sex, Rob says.
"It's like a gambling addiction," he says. "It's like losing yourself in the process of it, and the men that I work with, they're lost in the flirting and the looking and the possibilities of what might happen. They may never actually have an erection. But they can spend hours and hours and hours kind of lost in fantasy."
Of the 40 million people who regularly visit porn websites, approximately 85 to 90 percent are recreational users. The rest are compulsive users, meaning addicts.*
When you're an addict, Rob says, you begin to notice the consequences of your actions. Kirk felt like a hypocrite onstage, while Josh dealt with marital problems. These problems were born out of their excessive porn use, but both men chose to ignore them, Rob says.
How can you heal a porn addict? Rob says that like drug or alcohol addicts, people with sexual addictions need strong support systems to break the cycle. Spouses may not be the best people to turn to, however, because they often feel angry and hurt by sexual addictions. Rob recommends therapy and 12-step programs to anyone struggling with a porn addiction.
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